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A YT7 snippet a day keeps the zombies away
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Dartz
Mar 9, 2012, 3:24:37 AM3/9/12
to
With some honest to God plot.
---
It was a quiet night.
I blamed the rain, and the creeping unease that was starting to spread through the city’s residents that they could be next. I was dressed in one of my usual work outfits, which was making breathing a bit of an effort. There wasn't much to do.
The band were crap.
There wasn't much to do but pass the time
Warera, Rory and Conda were around. The look on their faces when I called them over to arrange a meeting to purchase a handgun was somewhere between stunned surprise, and smug satisfaction. This wasn't going to be cheap, but I had a war chest of my own built up.
I had cash.
A message came through from Sylia, asking to see me in the morning. Sure, no problem, after I pick up my new gun. I had to fix some equipment that broke, and the N-police were called after someone was beaten to within an inch of his life then left in the alleyway, after he stopped someone raping his girlfriend or something.
As usual, there was no CCTV footage because the tanned bastard beside us objected on privacy grounds.
We had a ten minute power failure after a minor tremor. That was fun. I learned my voice carried without the aid of the sound system. And I was subject to more passes than a Lada on an autobahn.
All in all, a normal day's work, for a normal days pay.
All the while constantly looking forward to a night's entertainment back home. Maybe it might've been a better idea to get some sleep and restore the chemical balance in my head, but.... sexaroid love. Given the choice between an even emotional keel and hot lesbian threesomes.
There was no choice.
What can I say? I was programmed for sex. And there was nothing wrong with enjoying my programming a little. The night was cold and dark, and seemed to be waiting for a storm to roll in. Largo. DD. Sylia. Knight Sabers. Saving the 33-S….. Saving my secret. It was all building into a big fat thunderhead, ready to rain on my parade. I knew it was going to fall down.
I just hoped it would hold off for long enough. Please hold off.
And remember to watch out for braindead drivers while trying to figuring out some way to deal with all this crap.
I pulled the old bike up in it’s usual parking space…. Marked out by an oilstain on the concrete…. and chained it to a structural column. Nobody would steal such an old thing anyway. I doubt anyone knew how to drill out an ignition barrel anymore anyway; most theft involved spoofing a key fob.
Sylvie’s was unchained. Unlocked. And easy enough for me to wheel over and chain to my own. Safety in numbers. The lift had jammed again, with someone yelling for help inside. Being a caring and upstanding member of the community, I assumed someone else would call the rescue services and traipsed up the stairs cursing the oxymoron of a building maintenance company I paid money to every week.
It was still a long way off being a shithole. The hot water worked, the rain stayed out, there weren’t any zapper-heads lying in the hallways in pools of their own shit, and the only swastikas on the wall were the ones on a poster suggesting a visit to a nearby temple would help bring peace to your hectic modern life.
The smell of coffee greeted me as my door swung open.
Anri was sitting on the couch, with a paper mug of steaming coffee in her hands. She was inhaling it’s aroma, with a dreamy expression spreading across her face. The label on it was from a place just down the street that did serve good coffee.
Despite being named the ‘Piss’ Café. Engrish was alive and well in the 21st century. The door slammed shut behind me. She started, a small smile spreading across her face as she recognised me.
“I told you to stay inside.” I said.
She frowned. “It was boring just staying in here. I’m free, aren’t I?”
Fair point. “Freed to get all of us killed,” I grumbled at her. “And how did you pay for that anyway?”
Anri bared her teeth in a savage grin.
“The man behind the counter, he gave it to me... on the house,”
I sighed. “Well, enjoy then. But I have coffee and food enough... and our diet supplements,”
“I found them!. I just wanted to go outside,” she said. “I’ve been feeling better. And what’s the use of making it to earth, if I can’t go out and see it?”
Good point Anri.
“You will soon. I promise.”
She could see mountains out my window. She could see the ocean. She was watching television. Some american import cop show was on.
“I plead the second!”
Gunfire erupted onscreen, and Anri spasmed. She nearly threw the coffee cup across the room. She looked at me for explanation.
“Humans kill each other a lot too. They’re shit that way. ”
“Why?”
“Because humans hate differences.” I explained.
She nodded in understanding. And I remembered analysis after analysis of cyberpunk works likening the sapient machines struggling for recognition of their rights to so many oppressed groups throughout history. We were allegories for mans own cruelty and prejudice, and overcoming it. If they could learn to accept an artificial human, why not one with different colour skin? Or not.
Joy. I was a literary tool.
Anri seemed to think for a moment
“Are we better than them?” she asked, in a cautious voice. She looked to me for confirmation.
I nodded once. “We are,”
I truly believed that at least. As good as some people were, it seemed that it was only humans were capable of being evil.
Anri and Sylvie acted out of blind panic. A battleboomer is a slave to it’s programming. It’s no more responsible for it’s actions than a car is for the dead pedestrian. It’s the man behind the keyboard, or the nut holding onto the wheel that’s ultimately responsible for the resulting bloodshed.
While the crimes of rational human beings are well known through history.
“I’m going to go get into something more comfortable,”
Leathers off. tank top on. Nothing else. Sylvie was in the shower for a mysteriously long time, and since we’d be getting all hot and sweaty later anyway, it wasn’t worth waiting. We could just lounge around in comfort.
I cooked up a fresh meal of curried noodles and ‘chicken’. It wasn’t tasty. It was barely nutritious. It was enough to live off of, especially with our metal additives. Sylvie and Anri poked and prodded for a few minutes to be certain it wouldn’t kill them, then wolfed it down like gourmet cuisine.
Like everything, it was a new experience for them.
Fresh food!
Sit there with me, watching them eat their first proper homecooked dinner, and tell me I’m doing the wrong thing? I bet you couldn’t. There was life in the apartment, an energy that filled the walls and made it feel like a real home. I gave them the edited version of my adventures in the real world, almost boasting about staying alive as long as I had. Here I am. I didn't tell them about the Sabers.
‘Leon knows what you are’, a whisper gnawed at the back of my skull.
Fuck off, I willed.
It didn’t go away. It was banished by the warble of a cellphone’s ringtone. I grasped at my pocket, getting only my underwear before figuring out it wasn’t mine. Anri shot to her feet.
“It’s him!”
She scrambled across the floor, over a pile of discarded clothes to something buzzing away underneath it.
“Who?” I asked
“The one who helped us,” Sylvie explained with. “He gave us that cellphone to contact us with,”
My stomache turned. Anri found it under a pillow.
“Catch!”
She tossed it to Sylvie, who caught it with no effort, flipping it open with her fingers.
“Hi! Yes, I was there. I found it,”
A pause. I held my breath. Sylvie nodded as she listened. She looked at me. “Tonight?” she mouthed.
I shook my head. Largo can’t hear me if I don’t speak.
“Not tonight, no,” she chirped her response. She looked at me again, her smile broadening. “We need to take it safe. And, we found another one of us, another 33-S. She’s agreed to help us,”
Fuck.
“A Meg-type. With the standard personality.”
I grimaced at her. Wait, what?
She nodded.“ Fine. We’ll contact you when we’re ready.”
It closed with a snap in her hand, before being tossed onto the couch.
I should’ve asked her why she told Largo about me. “Standard personality?” I questioned.
“We’re all created using standard personality templates, you know? We all start from the same template and get different as we live, but some things stay the same.” she explained. “Didn’t you meet any of your sisters when you first woke up?”
But I shouldn’t be anywhere near the standard Meg template if that’s the case.
“No.” I answered back.
The pair shared worried glances with each other. They were looking at me like I had terminal cancer. I could feel something crawling up my spine, the uneasy prickle of hundreds of nervous feet slowly pulling themselves up my back
“Maybe she was just awakened elsewhere?” Anri suggested.
“That’s it,” I confirmed. I had to have been. Standard personality might just be a lingering trait left over... something structural from the original Meg who was erased, how her mind was laid out.
“Odd,” said Sylvie with a finger to her lips.
And I felt another cold chill run up my spine. I forced myself to switch tracks. I can’t afford an existential crisis right now. There was a whole load of questions just waiting to burst out and demand answers I didn’t want to give. Not yet.
It was past 3 am and I was desperately in need of sleep to help straighten my head. Neurotransmitters were getting way out whack. I needed a clear head in the morning. We didn’t do near as much as the previous night. Just some relaxation exercises.
The last thing left to do before sleeping was Anri’s transfusion.
The idea was, each one of us would spend ten minutes circulating her blood through our own bodies, via the transfer ports in her neck, through our canines. She’d lost a lot of blood, which damaged her ability to filter it. As a stop-gap, Sylvie replaced it with human blood. Human blood cells begin die within hours in our bodies, so she needed a continuous replacement. Meanwhile, the dead cells began to play havoc with her circulation system if they weren’t filtered out.
What Sylvie and I were doing, was basically the 33-S equivalent of kidney dialysis.
And by removing all the biological debris, we could give her body a chance to recover on it’s own. We could each spare a half a litre from our own bodies before we started to have trouble. She’d be weak.... but surviving on her own.
I won rock-paper-scissors.
“You get to go first, Meg,”
And I found myself looking at Anri with her shoulder bared, and no idea how to actually start. Sure I understood the mechanics....
“Maybe it’s Meg’s first time,” she giggled.
Thanks for turning it into a sexual metaphor Anri. Really. Thanks. Okay. Take a deep breath. Enable transfer hardware with a thought. My canines extended. I felt my mouth began to water. I licked my lips to moisten them.
My heart rate upped, building blood pressure. I forced myself to take a cooling breath, before sitting down on the bed beside.
“It’s easy,” she assured me.
I slipped up beside her, the bare skin on out legs sliding against each other. Her skin was soft and silken, delicate as the finest from the Silky Doll and soothingly warm in a way humans weren’t. Her arm wrapped around my back, drawing me closer. My own mirrored the action... a programmed response. Electric currents tingled across my body as our breasts met, squishing down until our stomache met.
Anri leaned her chin down on my shoulder, her hair tickling against my ear. I did the same... and didn’t want to do anything else.
She smelled of sweat and coffee.
I opened my mouth, and stared down at her shoulder. I knew exactly where to bite. I wanted to bite.
Should I warn her first, or should I just dive right in?
“I’m going to,” I said in my best silken voice.
“unh,” she nodded. I felt her shiver.
I swallowed a lump in my throat, taking a few seconds to focus my thoughts. I opened my mouth, and bit straight through. Her skin popped and she jumped in my arms from the pain of penetration. My teeth locked into place, electronic signals confirmed a good lock. My heart raced. I felt my blood rush straight through my mouth.
It burst forward..... it just flowed. Her body relaxed, melting against me as a trickle of glowing pink perflourocarbons ran down her chest. A faint moan rose through her throat as my heart rate peaked. I could taste my chemical blood in my mouth, leaking and mingling with Anri’s own.
It had a metallic twinge to it, a coppery taste that was more human....
She pulled me tight.
And bit hard, penetrating straight through.
The shock of it bolted through my body. She engaged a moment later, software letting me know she’d made a good seal. A moment later, she started to pump.
It was an injection of heat, bursting crawling through my body, flowing through me and filling me with warmth. It was....
Soothing
Anri finished the thought for me.
We’re...
Accessing each other minds. It’s a ….
Data exchange. An exchange of thought. An exchange of sensation. As she opened herself up I could feel my awareness expanding to fill her frame, every little tickle and tingle in her body mirroring my own. I could feel her moving within me... investigating.
I could feel her.....her thoughts, her ghost brushing at the edge of my mind.
It was terrifying
It is perfectly normal.
It was... exhilarating.
I could feel my own hand slip down her stomach. I could feel hers cupping my breast. It was mutual. It was simultaneous. It was.... it was intense.
Humans can’t do this, can they?
No they can’t.
The human concept of intimacy...
is limited by their own bodies. We can go...
Deeper.
I was in her memory... in her mind. I was on Genaros, surrounded by the smell of steel and dry stale air. This was my home. The thought of home called up images to my mind.
Human
Yes. I was.
You can
Remember. I remember being human.
Through Anri’s eyes, I looked up at someone who looked so much like myself, it was uncanny. My sister. Dressed in the same overalls as Anri... I was looking at Anri through her eyes. She had spark...
I could see them all. I could remember them all.
….and more.
They live within me. Memories and experiences.
Saved so long as one of us still lives.
We all do.
[o]We live for each other. Freedom enough for all of us.[/i]
I rode along with her... feeling the thrill of escape. The raw naked excitement of fighting for life. My mind wandered to my first night in Megatokyo.... my desperate escape mirroring their own. Anri rode with me, as I drove with her.
And my doppelganger.
The pain of a gunshot to the gut brought my mind to my first gunfight with a boomer in a rundown apartment. Anri saw it.
It was..
Necessary.
Gunfire. Sylvie told me Meg... Lou... Nam... they’d died. We have to get freedom enough for all of them. We have to survive.
What’s it like to be human?
Different.
Her own curiosity wormed its way through my past. She slept with my girlfriend.... she came to class with me. She rode along with me on my final ride as a member of the human race, sticking with me right up until the moment I crossed over and...
Strange
A flash....
I was screaming. I was strapped to a table, screaming in abject terror, with a man looking down on me through shining glasses. His eyes were obscured by my own reflection.... naked. Raw terror in my face.
And then...
I became Meg. Riding through Megatokyo
What was....
...that?
I saw myself, coming through the door of that dingy apartment.... and felt the elation of recognition. We weren’t alone. I wasn’t alone... I found them. I....
The thrill of orgasm killed that thought dead. It exploded through both our bodies, a simultaneous eruption of raw hot sensation that rang through our muscles and resonated in our chests.
This is....
Perfect.
The programmed cycle finished. My shoulder cooled as as she stopped.... a chill rising up from my extremities. Her body fell away out of my awareness, her mind retreating back
It was
fun
A final shared thought. And then she was gone. I was inside myself... only myself. Another sharp pain in my shoulder told me she’d withdrawn.
I finished by adding a half-litre of my own blood to her body, before pushing off. My teeth unlatched, blood trickling down from my canines forming long pink streaks from the edge of my lips. My body was shivering... a chill spreading through my frame.
Warnings of contamination began to announce themselves in my mind. My thoughts began to get... fluffy, loosing their hard edge.
I sat back, feeling my canines lock back into their natural place, still trying to process what I’d just done. Anri was looking at me through wide, her expression an ambivalant mix of pleasure and....
Worry.
I blushed.
“I wasn’t that bad,”
“No,” she shook her head. “It’s just....”
A sick unease rose up inside me. My thoughts fell back on that flash that.... dream?
“What?” I pushed. She glanced over at Sylvie, who’d been watching the whole time. Then back at me. “Is it because I.... remember being human?”
“No!” she shook her head again “Definitely not.... “ she shrunk down, cringing into herself. “Not entirely,”
Sylvie stood up. Her eyes growing wide
“Meg remembers being human? They left her human memory intact?”
Anri and I nodded in unison.
“So?”
“We were all human once,” Sylvie explained. “Thats how our templates were created. Human volunteers had their minds copied... before their memories were erased. Yours weren’t for some reason.”
“But that’s not it. Is it?”
“Meg.... your memory was erased. Multiple times. It was erased right before....” she stopped, her eyes locking with mine. “The last cut is right before you realise where you are, when you arrive,”
I stared at her.
“I...”
The thought died.
“um...”
The thought died.
“Ah...”
It died. Terror flared. I scanned around. I knew what it meant...
“I had...”
Crunch.
Hot liquid fear burned in my body. Something was wrong... I knew deep inside something was terribly wrong, but couldn’t wrap my mind around it. I was banging my conscious thoughts against a concrete wall inside my head, try to get through.
“I can. I can... I can,”
I looked to each of them, feeling my eyes go wide. Sylvie was standing, looking like she was ready to grab me, but not sure if she should. Anri just looked horrified...
“They damaged you,” she said, her voice soft and tentative. Not my body, me. That thing that was the sum total of all my memories and experiences.
That’s when the wall broke...
My body was built in 2029. I ‘arrived’ in 2032.
That was three years.
I’d known there’d been some ‘edit’ work.... one did not suddenly wake up with a body like mine and carry one as if nothing had happen. It never bothered me.... I was incapable of being bothered by it.
I stood up, a little shakily, trying to worm through everything in my head. It all looked fine... it looked contiguous. Subjectively everything seemed whole.
“How can you tell?” I asked Anri. “That my memories have been tampered with?”
“They cut off sharply,” she said. “It’s cut and paste, without being smoothed out. I can see the gaps,”
“Like Lou?” Sylvie interjected.
“Unh,” Anru nodded.
“Where?”
I didn’t really want to know.
“Everything before Megatokyo,”
It hung in my mind. It hovered there casting it’s shadow over everything that made me who I was. I had to sit down again
“Maybe we should continue,” Sylvie suggested, looking at us both.
“Go ahead,” I said, quietly speaking.
“I feel better already,” Anri offered a smile.
I felt sick to my stomach, and didn’t know whether it was from my body struggling to handle Anri’s blood, or the full naked realisation that I had been tampered with.
What did you do to me, Toren Smith you son of a bitch?
I didn’t watch Anri and Sylvie.I didn’t get a chance to get to sleep. I was staring at my reflection in the window as the sun started to creep up over the bay.
-----
---
It was a quiet night.
I blamed the rain, and the creeping unease that was starting to spread through the city’s residents that they could be next. I was dressed in one of my usual work outfits, which was making breathing a bit of an effort. There wasn't much to do.
The band were crap.
There wasn't much to do but pass the time
Warera, Rory and Conda were around. The look on their faces when I called them over to arrange a meeting to purchase a handgun was somewhere between stunned surprise, and smug satisfaction. This wasn't going to be cheap, but I had a war chest of my own built up.
I had cash.
A message came through from Sylia, asking to see me in the morning. Sure, no problem, after I pick up my new gun. I had to fix some equipment that broke, and the N-police were called after someone was beaten to within an inch of his life then left in the alleyway, after he stopped someone raping his girlfriend or something.
As usual, there was no CCTV footage because the tanned bastard beside us objected on privacy grounds.
We had a ten minute power failure after a minor tremor. That was fun. I learned my voice carried without the aid of the sound system. And I was subject to more passes than a Lada on an autobahn.
All in all, a normal day's work, for a normal days pay.
All the while constantly looking forward to a night's entertainment back home. Maybe it might've been a better idea to get some sleep and restore the chemical balance in my head, but.... sexaroid love. Given the choice between an even emotional keel and hot lesbian threesomes.
There was no choice.
What can I say? I was programmed for sex. And there was nothing wrong with enjoying my programming a little. The night was cold and dark, and seemed to be waiting for a storm to roll in. Largo. DD. Sylia. Knight Sabers. Saving the 33-S….. Saving my secret. It was all building into a big fat thunderhead, ready to rain on my parade. I knew it was going to fall down.
I just hoped it would hold off for long enough. Please hold off.
And remember to watch out for braindead drivers while trying to figuring out some way to deal with all this crap.
I pulled the old bike up in it’s usual parking space…. Marked out by an oilstain on the concrete…. and chained it to a structural column. Nobody would steal such an old thing anyway. I doubt anyone knew how to drill out an ignition barrel anymore anyway; most theft involved spoofing a key fob.
Sylvie’s was unchained. Unlocked. And easy enough for me to wheel over and chain to my own. Safety in numbers. The lift had jammed again, with someone yelling for help inside. Being a caring and upstanding member of the community, I assumed someone else would call the rescue services and traipsed up the stairs cursing the oxymoron of a building maintenance company I paid money to every week.
It was still a long way off being a shithole. The hot water worked, the rain stayed out, there weren’t any zapper-heads lying in the hallways in pools of their own shit, and the only swastikas on the wall were the ones on a poster suggesting a visit to a nearby temple would help bring peace to your hectic modern life.
The smell of coffee greeted me as my door swung open.
Anri was sitting on the couch, with a paper mug of steaming coffee in her hands. She was inhaling it’s aroma, with a dreamy expression spreading across her face. The label on it was from a place just down the street that did serve good coffee.
Despite being named the ‘Piss’ Café. Engrish was alive and well in the 21st century. The door slammed shut behind me. She started, a small smile spreading across her face as she recognised me.
“I told you to stay inside.” I said.
She frowned. “It was boring just staying in here. I’m free, aren’t I?”
Fair point. “Freed to get all of us killed,” I grumbled at her. “And how did you pay for that anyway?”
Anri bared her teeth in a savage grin.
“The man behind the counter, he gave it to me... on the house,”
I sighed. “Well, enjoy then. But I have coffee and food enough... and our diet supplements,”
“I found them!. I just wanted to go outside,” she said. “I’ve been feeling better. And what’s the use of making it to earth, if I can’t go out and see it?”
Good point Anri.
“You will soon. I promise.”
She could see mountains out my window. She could see the ocean. She was watching television. Some american import cop show was on.
“I plead the second!”
Gunfire erupted onscreen, and Anri spasmed. She nearly threw the coffee cup across the room. She looked at me for explanation.
“Humans kill each other a lot too. They’re shit that way. ”
“Why?”
“Because humans hate differences.” I explained.
She nodded in understanding. And I remembered analysis after analysis of cyberpunk works likening the sapient machines struggling for recognition of their rights to so many oppressed groups throughout history. We were allegories for mans own cruelty and prejudice, and overcoming it. If they could learn to accept an artificial human, why not one with different colour skin? Or not.
Joy. I was a literary tool.
Anri seemed to think for a moment
“Are we better than them?” she asked, in a cautious voice. She looked to me for confirmation.
I nodded once. “We are,”
I truly believed that at least. As good as some people were, it seemed that it was only humans were capable of being evil.
Anri and Sylvie acted out of blind panic. A battleboomer is a slave to it’s programming. It’s no more responsible for it’s actions than a car is for the dead pedestrian. It’s the man behind the keyboard, or the nut holding onto the wheel that’s ultimately responsible for the resulting bloodshed.
While the crimes of rational human beings are well known through history.
“I’m going to go get into something more comfortable,”
Leathers off. tank top on. Nothing else. Sylvie was in the shower for a mysteriously long time, and since we’d be getting all hot and sweaty later anyway, it wasn’t worth waiting. We could just lounge around in comfort.
I cooked up a fresh meal of curried noodles and ‘chicken’. It wasn’t tasty. It was barely nutritious. It was enough to live off of, especially with our metal additives. Sylvie and Anri poked and prodded for a few minutes to be certain it wouldn’t kill them, then wolfed it down like gourmet cuisine.
Like everything, it was a new experience for them.
Fresh food!
Sit there with me, watching them eat their first proper homecooked dinner, and tell me I’m doing the wrong thing? I bet you couldn’t. There was life in the apartment, an energy that filled the walls and made it feel like a real home. I gave them the edited version of my adventures in the real world, almost boasting about staying alive as long as I had. Here I am. I didn't tell them about the Sabers.
‘Leon knows what you are’, a whisper gnawed at the back of my skull.
Fuck off, I willed.
It didn’t go away. It was banished by the warble of a cellphone’s ringtone. I grasped at my pocket, getting only my underwear before figuring out it wasn’t mine. Anri shot to her feet.
“It’s him!”
She scrambled across the floor, over a pile of discarded clothes to something buzzing away underneath it.
“Who?” I asked
“The one who helped us,” Sylvie explained with. “He gave us that cellphone to contact us with,”
My stomache turned. Anri found it under a pillow.
“Catch!”
She tossed it to Sylvie, who caught it with no effort, flipping it open with her fingers.
“Hi! Yes, I was there. I found it,”
A pause. I held my breath. Sylvie nodded as she listened. She looked at me. “Tonight?” she mouthed.
I shook my head. Largo can’t hear me if I don’t speak.
“Not tonight, no,” she chirped her response. She looked at me again, her smile broadening. “We need to take it safe. And, we found another one of us, another 33-S. She’s agreed to help us,”
Fuck.
“A Meg-type. With the standard personality.”
I grimaced at her. Wait, what?
She nodded.“ Fine. We’ll contact you when we’re ready.”
It closed with a snap in her hand, before being tossed onto the couch.
I should’ve asked her why she told Largo about me. “Standard personality?” I questioned.
“We’re all created using standard personality templates, you know? We all start from the same template and get different as we live, but some things stay the same.” she explained. “Didn’t you meet any of your sisters when you first woke up?”
But I shouldn’t be anywhere near the standard Meg template if that’s the case.
“No.” I answered back.
The pair shared worried glances with each other. They were looking at me like I had terminal cancer. I could feel something crawling up my spine, the uneasy prickle of hundreds of nervous feet slowly pulling themselves up my back
“Maybe she was just awakened elsewhere?” Anri suggested.
“That’s it,” I confirmed. I had to have been. Standard personality might just be a lingering trait left over... something structural from the original Meg who was erased, how her mind was laid out.
“Odd,” said Sylvie with a finger to her lips.
And I felt another cold chill run up my spine. I forced myself to switch tracks. I can’t afford an existential crisis right now. There was a whole load of questions just waiting to burst out and demand answers I didn’t want to give. Not yet.
It was past 3 am and I was desperately in need of sleep to help straighten my head. Neurotransmitters were getting way out whack. I needed a clear head in the morning. We didn’t do near as much as the previous night. Just some relaxation exercises.
The last thing left to do before sleeping was Anri’s transfusion.
The idea was, each one of us would spend ten minutes circulating her blood through our own bodies, via the transfer ports in her neck, through our canines. She’d lost a lot of blood, which damaged her ability to filter it. As a stop-gap, Sylvie replaced it with human blood. Human blood cells begin die within hours in our bodies, so she needed a continuous replacement. Meanwhile, the dead cells began to play havoc with her circulation system if they weren’t filtered out.
What Sylvie and I were doing, was basically the 33-S equivalent of kidney dialysis.
And by removing all the biological debris, we could give her body a chance to recover on it’s own. We could each spare a half a litre from our own bodies before we started to have trouble. She’d be weak.... but surviving on her own.
I won rock-paper-scissors.
“You get to go first, Meg,”
And I found myself looking at Anri with her shoulder bared, and no idea how to actually start. Sure I understood the mechanics....
“Maybe it’s Meg’s first time,” she giggled.
Thanks for turning it into a sexual metaphor Anri. Really. Thanks. Okay. Take a deep breath. Enable transfer hardware with a thought. My canines extended. I felt my mouth began to water. I licked my lips to moisten them.
My heart rate upped, building blood pressure. I forced myself to take a cooling breath, before sitting down on the bed beside.
“It’s easy,” she assured me.
I slipped up beside her, the bare skin on out legs sliding against each other. Her skin was soft and silken, delicate as the finest from the Silky Doll and soothingly warm in a way humans weren’t. Her arm wrapped around my back, drawing me closer. My own mirrored the action... a programmed response. Electric currents tingled across my body as our breasts met, squishing down until our stomache met.
Anri leaned her chin down on my shoulder, her hair tickling against my ear. I did the same... and didn’t want to do anything else.
She smelled of sweat and coffee.
I opened my mouth, and stared down at her shoulder. I knew exactly where to bite. I wanted to bite.
Should I warn her first, or should I just dive right in?
“I’m going to,” I said in my best silken voice.
“unh,” she nodded. I felt her shiver.
I swallowed a lump in my throat, taking a few seconds to focus my thoughts. I opened my mouth, and bit straight through. Her skin popped and she jumped in my arms from the pain of penetration. My teeth locked into place, electronic signals confirmed a good lock. My heart raced. I felt my blood rush straight through my mouth.
It burst forward..... it just flowed. Her body relaxed, melting against me as a trickle of glowing pink perflourocarbons ran down her chest. A faint moan rose through her throat as my heart rate peaked. I could taste my chemical blood in my mouth, leaking and mingling with Anri’s own.
It had a metallic twinge to it, a coppery taste that was more human....
She pulled me tight.
And bit hard, penetrating straight through.
The shock of it bolted through my body. She engaged a moment later, software letting me know she’d made a good seal. A moment later, she started to pump.
It was an injection of heat, bursting crawling through my body, flowing through me and filling me with warmth. It was....
Soothing
Anri finished the thought for me.
We’re...
Accessing each other minds. It’s a ….
Data exchange. An exchange of thought. An exchange of sensation. As she opened herself up I could feel my awareness expanding to fill her frame, every little tickle and tingle in her body mirroring my own. I could feel her moving within me... investigating.
I could feel her.....her thoughts, her ghost brushing at the edge of my mind.
It was terrifying
It is perfectly normal.
It was... exhilarating.
I could feel my own hand slip down her stomach. I could feel hers cupping my breast. It was mutual. It was simultaneous. It was.... it was intense.
Humans can’t do this, can they?
No they can’t.
The human concept of intimacy...
is limited by their own bodies. We can go...
Deeper.
I was in her memory... in her mind. I was on Genaros, surrounded by the smell of steel and dry stale air. This was my home. The thought of home called up images to my mind.
Human
Yes. I was.
You can
Remember. I remember being human.
Through Anri’s eyes, I looked up at someone who looked so much like myself, it was uncanny. My sister. Dressed in the same overalls as Anri... I was looking at Anri through her eyes. She had spark...
I could see them all. I could remember them all.
….and more.
They live within me. Memories and experiences.
Saved so long as one of us still lives.
We all do.
[o]We live for each other. Freedom enough for all of us.[/i]
I rode along with her... feeling the thrill of escape. The raw naked excitement of fighting for life. My mind wandered to my first night in Megatokyo.... my desperate escape mirroring their own. Anri rode with me, as I drove with her.
And my doppelganger.
The pain of a gunshot to the gut brought my mind to my first gunfight with a boomer in a rundown apartment. Anri saw it.
It was..
Necessary.
Gunfire. Sylvie told me Meg... Lou... Nam... they’d died. We have to get freedom enough for all of them. We have to survive.
What’s it like to be human?
Different.
Her own curiosity wormed its way through my past. She slept with my girlfriend.... she came to class with me. She rode along with me on my final ride as a member of the human race, sticking with me right up until the moment I crossed over and...
Strange
A flash....
I was screaming. I was strapped to a table, screaming in abject terror, with a man looking down on me through shining glasses. His eyes were obscured by my own reflection.... naked. Raw terror in my face.
And then...
I became Meg. Riding through Megatokyo
What was....
...that?
I saw myself, coming through the door of that dingy apartment.... and felt the elation of recognition. We weren’t alone. I wasn’t alone... I found them. I....
The thrill of orgasm killed that thought dead. It exploded through both our bodies, a simultaneous eruption of raw hot sensation that rang through our muscles and resonated in our chests.
This is....
Perfect.
The programmed cycle finished. My shoulder cooled as as she stopped.... a chill rising up from my extremities. Her body fell away out of my awareness, her mind retreating back
It was
fun
A final shared thought. And then she was gone. I was inside myself... only myself. Another sharp pain in my shoulder told me she’d withdrawn.
I finished by adding a half-litre of my own blood to her body, before pushing off. My teeth unlatched, blood trickling down from my canines forming long pink streaks from the edge of my lips. My body was shivering... a chill spreading through my frame.
Warnings of contamination began to announce themselves in my mind. My thoughts began to get... fluffy, loosing their hard edge.
I sat back, feeling my canines lock back into their natural place, still trying to process what I’d just done. Anri was looking at me through wide, her expression an ambivalant mix of pleasure and....
Worry.
I blushed.
“I wasn’t that bad,”
“No,” she shook her head. “It’s just....”
A sick unease rose up inside me. My thoughts fell back on that flash that.... dream?
“What?” I pushed. She glanced over at Sylvie, who’d been watching the whole time. Then back at me. “Is it because I.... remember being human?”
“No!” she shook her head again “Definitely not.... “ she shrunk down, cringing into herself. “Not entirely,”
Sylvie stood up. Her eyes growing wide
“Meg remembers being human? They left her human memory intact?”
Anri and I nodded in unison.
“So?”
“We were all human once,” Sylvie explained. “Thats how our templates were created. Human volunteers had their minds copied... before their memories were erased. Yours weren’t for some reason.”
“But that’s not it. Is it?”
“Meg.... your memory was erased. Multiple times. It was erased right before....” she stopped, her eyes locking with mine. “The last cut is right before you realise where you are, when you arrive,”
I stared at her.
“I...”
The thought died.
“um...”
The thought died.
“Ah...”
It died. Terror flared. I scanned around. I knew what it meant...
“I had...”
Crunch.
Hot liquid fear burned in my body. Something was wrong... I knew deep inside something was terribly wrong, but couldn’t wrap my mind around it. I was banging my conscious thoughts against a concrete wall inside my head, try to get through.
“I can. I can... I can,”
I looked to each of them, feeling my eyes go wide. Sylvie was standing, looking like she was ready to grab me, but not sure if she should. Anri just looked horrified...
“They damaged you,” she said, her voice soft and tentative. Not my body, me. That thing that was the sum total of all my memories and experiences.
That’s when the wall broke...
My body was built in 2029. I ‘arrived’ in 2032.
That was three years.
I’d known there’d been some ‘edit’ work.... one did not suddenly wake up with a body like mine and carry one as if nothing had happen. It never bothered me.... I was incapable of being bothered by it.
I stood up, a little shakily, trying to worm through everything in my head. It all looked fine... it looked contiguous. Subjectively everything seemed whole.
“How can you tell?” I asked Anri. “That my memories have been tampered with?”
“They cut off sharply,” she said. “It’s cut and paste, without being smoothed out. I can see the gaps,”
“Like Lou?” Sylvie interjected.
“Unh,” Anru nodded.
“Where?”
I didn’t really want to know.
“Everything before Megatokyo,”
It hung in my mind. It hovered there casting it’s shadow over everything that made me who I was. I had to sit down again
“Maybe we should continue,” Sylvie suggested, looking at us both.
“Go ahead,” I said, quietly speaking.
“I feel better already,” Anri offered a smile.
I felt sick to my stomach, and didn’t know whether it was from my body struggling to handle Anri’s blood, or the full naked realisation that I had been tampered with.
What did you do to me, Toren Smith you son of a bitch?
I didn’t watch Anri and Sylvie.I didn’t get a chance to get to sleep. I was staring at my reflection in the window as the sun started to creep up over the bay.
-----
Dartz
Apr 10, 2012, 9:36:39 AM4/10/12
to
Playing with something on my end and need an excuse to test it.
So I might as well post *something* worthwhile rather than just
posting 'I'm testing this yoke'.
Just a random dialogue snippet
----------
“Meg. What was your mother’s name? I’ll bet that, not only can
you not remember.... you never even thought about it until I
asked you.”
“You arrived in this world originally, in 2029. When we brought
you through, we wanted our own Avatar, our own Craig Reed. We
hoped to bring you here and properly train you, before sending
you to MegaTokyo."
“But we got it wrong. What we pulled through didn’t have long
to live. Rather than waste a potential, we were able to make
a destructive copy of your mind. We found a body capable of
housing it, and one which would be immune to the enemy’s glams
whilst having it’s own....advantages over baseline human.”
“The first one didn’t go so well. You went insane pretty quickly.
The stress of being taken transdimensional, and then awakened in
a new body was too much for your psyche. Nevertheless, we had
your copy on file, so we reset your memory with the image. Again,
you lost your mind soon after. The third image wanted to do
nothing more than have sex.“
“Eventually, we began to modify your personality image, to better
make it fit. Through trial and error, we were able to extend the
psychological lifespan of each succeeding re-image. We removed
memories and concepts that anchored you to your previous life,
while adding new ones to enable you to accept your body. The
mind’s natural ability to cover for its failing helped fill the
resulting gaps."
“It required a balance. We needed to anchor your self to this
body and provide just enough proof to your mind that you were
still the same person, while retaining your unique characteristics
and knowledge, and at the same time removing that which would
cause psychological trouble, or feelings of longing,”
“It took us over two years to get an image that remained stable.
We sent you to Megatokyo with your motorcycle, with instructions
to deliver one letter to Lady633, and place another on a specific
bridge, then ride off wearing the clothes you’d worn on the night
you came through. Five minutes after depositing the letter, your
mind was reset back, so that it appeared from your perspective,
as if you had just arrived and spontaneously transformed.”
“We doubted your ability to keep this secret from Sylia.
So why take the risk?”
“And you know what? It worked. “
-----
Crickets.
So I might as well post *something* worthwhile rather than just
posting 'I'm testing this yoke'.
Just a random dialogue snippet
----------
“Meg. What was your mother’s name? I’ll bet that, not only can
you not remember.... you never even thought about it until I
asked you.”
“You arrived in this world originally, in 2029. When we brought
you through, we wanted our own Avatar, our own Craig Reed. We
hoped to bring you here and properly train you, before sending
you to MegaTokyo."
“But we got it wrong. What we pulled through didn’t have long
to live. Rather than waste a potential, we were able to make
a destructive copy of your mind. We found a body capable of
housing it, and one which would be immune to the enemy’s glams
whilst having it’s own....advantages over baseline human.”
“The first one didn’t go so well. You went insane pretty quickly.
The stress of being taken transdimensional, and then awakened in
a new body was too much for your psyche. Nevertheless, we had
your copy on file, so we reset your memory with the image. Again,
you lost your mind soon after. The third image wanted to do
nothing more than have sex.“
“Eventually, we began to modify your personality image, to better
make it fit. Through trial and error, we were able to extend the
psychological lifespan of each succeeding re-image. We removed
memories and concepts that anchored you to your previous life,
while adding new ones to enable you to accept your body. The
mind’s natural ability to cover for its failing helped fill the
resulting gaps."
“It required a balance. We needed to anchor your self to this
body and provide just enough proof to your mind that you were
still the same person, while retaining your unique characteristics
and knowledge, and at the same time removing that which would
cause psychological trouble, or feelings of longing,”
“It took us over two years to get an image that remained stable.
We sent you to Megatokyo with your motorcycle, with instructions
to deliver one letter to Lady633, and place another on a specific
bridge, then ride off wearing the clothes you’d worn on the night
you came through. Five minutes after depositing the letter, your
mind was reset back, so that it appeared from your perspective,
as if you had just arrived and spontaneously transformed.”
“We doubted your ability to keep this secret from Sylia.
So why take the risk?”
“And you know what? It worked. “
-----
Crickets.
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